Royal Melbourne Hospital Emergency Department

Four hours in the emergency department of a large metropolitan hospital. Two rounds of blood tests to determine that I did, in fact, only have a mild headache, and not the onset of blood clots associated with a certain vaccine. An abundance of caution, perhaps - but not unwise. As I told the triage nurse, I was only following the doctor’s health advice.

The day continued with an irritating meeting, one of a series in recent times, following which our office was brazenly burgled while we sat in the front room. We only realised it was happening when said burglar tripped over a chair leg.

Altogether an inconvenient day. However, not really a bad one by global standards. Look only to Afghanistan, for instance, or even closer to home, the impact the pandemic is having on many in my own city.

I noticed my reaction to these events: a quiet, observational peacefulness - I was not ruffled, not disrupted, not terribly put out by this compact string of less-than-optimal events. Could my equanimity be a direct product of daily meditation for nearly two years?

I was not shaken by a brush with a burglar, or by four hours of mind-numbing (and seemingly endless, at the time) waiting in an uncomfortable chair in a grey emergency department. I was not even annoyed when they had to retake my bloods as a result of a printing systems glitch that mixed up the labels on the first batch.

Not perturbed by any of this - and of course, I have heard many times that the place to see evidence of the benefits of mindfulness meditation is in day-to-day life, rather than during the sessions themselves. My day: a friend expressed commiseration for my ‘bad day’, but it was one that I felt was merely mildly inconvenient - could this be the evidence the meditation teachers speak of?

Pessoa was not a happy fellow, I suspect, if that matters at all. He was a self-articulated absence in the empty, narrative-less history of his own much-divided personality. He had volumes to say about very little indeed, if one was merely to estimate the fulness of his life from the sum of its narrative threads and activity. Not much happened to him, and he didn’t really go anywhere, once he landed in Lisbon.

Nevertheless, he had a great deal to say about life in general, much of it truly profound. As for me, I do not feel like a Pessoa-like absence in myself, much less a divided and multiplied series of heteronymic identities, each with a distinctive voice. Nevertheless, I take great pleasure from reading Pessoa and I admire (and would emulate, if at all possible) his ability to make robust bricks from the seemingly useless clay and straw of his thin, mundane, external daily life.

Pessoa saw no need to travel physically, which I admire. He was a counterpoint to the common wisdom that it is travel that broadens the mind. He named this endeavour as vastly inferior to the expansive roaming he had undertaken in his soul and in his own mind. There was, for Pessoa, nothing ‘out there’ that could act as revelation and education so profound as the journeying he had done in the expanses of his own (vacant) inner self, while his body barely strayed from the same streets of Lisbon throughout an adult life cut somewhat short.

I am not sure what is drawing me to him, but I am finding something of a personal parallel in the mix of ingredients found in the Book of Disquiet, some strange affinity between the Book of Disquiet and the mindfulness meditation that has crowned and terminated each of my days for the last two years. Pessoa’s life resembled that of his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares (a self-described ‘mutilation’ of his own personality) - walking and looking down upon the familiar streets of the city he knew; Soares’ dull and never-changing office with its desk, windows, ledgers and endless daily routines; his far-from-remarkable coworkers; returning nightly to his rented room with its cracked walls; the restaurant on the second floor that he frequented, day after day.

And yet, within this utterly mundane and static framework vast personal interior landscapes unfold; deep chasms of emotional intensity are revealed; loss and indifference play out against his undeniable desire - often, the desire only for a species of embraced nothingness, or at least the opposite of commitment to action.

I have no idea where this is all going, and what will come out of it. For now, I follow my threads, and as usual, I will not rush a gestation of ideas that need time to fully emerge.

Twenty four hours later and still no reaction to the vaccine. This is a welcome fact.

Last night, when I meditated, I practised the technique of affirming that I know very little, or next to nothing, about a great many things. This takes effort. There is a tremendous relief in this, as in the day job I need to be in a state of constantly knowing what is going on across a broad range of matters to with projects or staff, all of which demand my professional attention. This is unbelievably tiring and I don’t like it. In fact I wear myself out bracing myself with a degree of resistance to it at all times.

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I don’t know and I don’t need to know. This is wisdom, respite, liberation. Necessary, too. When I meditate the burden of expertise lifts. That expertise, which I have amassed over 25 years of professional practice, is sharp and pointed, but narrow, like a needle. I know a lot about a narrow field of operation. This expertise is piercing at its point of focus but has little broader substance. It has utility, and the average architect is quite well-rounded, especially given architecture touches on many aspects of human life and habitation - but ultimately it is still a relatively narrow framework of expertise once applied.

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It is 9.25 pm. I will now retire to meditate.

The streets of Lisbon

Reading the Book of Disquiet was a quiet revelation, one which appeared before me at the age of fifty for the first time. In reading this text I suddenly realised that I had been searching for many years, hunting endlessly without being aware that I was hunting at all, for a mode of writing, a stratagem of prose, diary entry, utterance or confessional, that had some relevance to the clarity of the impulse to write daily that I carried within me. I discovered in Pessoa a prose form and set of topics expansive enough to encompass and extend my own messy, rambling vision in all its particulars.

Up until that point I had been confused. I had no idea why writing conventional stories on writerly topics, in a writerly way, held no fire or purpose for me. Quite simply, without Pessoa’s enigmatic example before me I had discovered no alternative model to “conventional” writing, whatever that is - and I was languishing. One day, several years ago, I expressed it thus: I found that I had many resources - a surfeit of tools, adequate time to work, and sufficient technique to write what I wished, and yet I had nothing to write.

Yes indeed, I believe that after twenty years of being paid to write and being published regularly I am adequately equipped in technique, discipline and vocabulary to accomplish a readable narrative. This alone is valuable, but otherwise of little assistance.

The commissioned essays, reviews and articles flow from my fingertips, quickly and without prevarication. The task is clear, and the technique has been honed to efficiency. However, this does not translate. I never got very far in my non-commissioned writing as the impetus to work petered out long before the work was finished. Sometimes this occurred even before the work was embarked upon; an ennui that accompanied the impulse, but stronger - an inertia that prevented all but the most cursory of writing.

Then I found the _Book of Disquiet_. I found that instead of the repeated frustration of moving forward into these endless dead ends, my mid-life reading of the _Book of Disquiet_ suggested to me that I could evoke Pessoa’s fragments as an absolute permission to write what I wished, on any topic that occurred to me - not as someone I wasn’t, which is ironic given Pessoa’s reliance on heteronyms - but as the person I was, doing the mundane things that I do. The designer who writes, and spends his days in an office, finally found a voice.

Pessoa showed the potential of the writer’s art for me, more so than any other writer I had read in about three decades. His master work, in all its incompleteness and fragmentary discontinuity, revealed to me the substance of topics and utterances that were directly relevant to the framing of my own experience, particularly in terms of their form and meaning. This was an example of a use of language that I could relate to, that sounded like me, equal parts transcendent and mundane - it was a language I could employ. More to the point, he spoke of topics, couched in terms of the frames of his ever-changing mind, that I could relate to.

To be more specific, here I misquote Dave Hickey writing on Gerhard Richter in _Tarkett_ art journal in 1993 (where I have boldly substituted the “painterly arts” with the “literary arts” for my own selfish purposes):

"In the literary arts, those antique categories of expression…were resuscitated…under conditions of absolute doubt - with the understanding that, as long as doubt remained an agency, and the written text it entailed affirmed that doubt, it could neither disintegrate into despair nor transcend into monadic assurance, but would remain, instead, always an absolute permission."

And so I write now, renewed and energised - embarking on an enthusiastic resuscitation of the raw potential revealed to me by Pessoa’s master work, invoked under the joyous conditions of absolute doubt. In an endlessly saturated visual and literary culture, where originality has long been a chimaera, how else can we work? If this was true for Pessoa in the first half of the 20th Century, how can it be less true now?

Having embraced that doubt, having found and invoked a model in language and a predisposition to topics that can frame my own authentic voice, I find that I am finally moving forward.

Now, like Pessoa, I am free to dream.